Booting to Sysinstall

[Manolis Kiagias]

Jerahmy Pocott wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Okay so here is the situation:
> Server has dead fd and cd drives, or maybe none at all. You want to 
> install FreeBSD
> on it.
>
> The idea I had was to create a small partition, copy the contents of a 
> cd into, set it
> to boot off that partition, reboot and it would boot up into sysinstall.
>
> Would this be possible? Or is it a dumb idea?
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>
The problem with this approach is, you actually need to boot the FreeBSD 
kernel to continue with the install. Just by marking a partition as 
bootable, will not make it boot, and neither copying the FreeBSD CD 
contents will. You have to write a suitable boot sector that will load 
the rest of the OS, be it DOS, Windows, FreeBSD or whatever. And the 
fact remains, to install FreeBSD you have to boot into the FreeBSD 
kernel. After that it would be no problem installing from files on a FAT 
partition. It would certainly be a lot less trouble to connect a floppy 
drive, boot from it, and continue with your partition based install. In 
fact, in your case I would simply remove the disk, place it on another 
machine, do a base install, copy the CD contents to a folder, move it 
back to the other machine and continue from there. If, in fact, the 
machine has fast internet access, the basic setup is all you need.

Manolis